Help on designing a database for a school management system

Hello I'm about to create a school management system where it should assure the relashionship between teachers, courses, classes, parents, students, report card, enrollment, administration, attendence ...

Some good ideas on t开发者_运维问答he DB structure and the system will be appreciated.

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I think they key thing to get correct is how the information is stored over TIME.

For example you cannot just set up a DB schema with

Class ----- StudentClass ----- Student

Because a class such as - 'Year 11 Science class' will have different intakes of students each semster. So each class needs to link to a semester. Linking to semester so you can see which students where in Year 11 Science in 2010 or in 2011 etc.

Same applies for Status of students are they currently enrolled or not? Most of the work is around traking the state of objects over time.

How you go about archiving this is up to you and how you want to use the data? Do you want to store it as in 3NF?

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From Database Answers (one of very many)

DB model is engine independent. RDBMS flavour matters for implementation

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You could consider looking at http://open-school.org/ for an existing open source solution and see the kinds of things it handles, then see if you have extra things to handle.

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There's an application called BANNER that deals with the administration of a small college. It's got just about everything in it. It's Oracle based. If you can get a description of it, you might pick up a few pointers.

I see you already got the pointer to Database Answers. What a good resource!